A contact center of a business enterprise records call data for a variety of purposes such as assessment of agent performance, system analysis, analytics processing, and so forth. Typically, when a contact center records calls, the contact center records the entire audio of the call. Depending on the nature of the call or of the business supported by the contact center, there might be private information exchanged during the call. The information might be private information spoken by the caller such as social security number, bank account number, phone number, and so forth. In addition, there might be proprietary information spoken by the agent such as transaction information, account balance, birth date, and so forth.
A problem arises once the recording of the call's media stream is written to non-volatile memory and saved. Once the recording is saved, the business enterprise has a responsibility to keep the saved data private and secure. In addition, authorized third parties might be required to have access to the saved call data, for purposes such as to enable contact center performance analysis, analytics model development, training, and so forth. Therefore, in order to share the call recordings and reduce the enterprise's liability, special handling of the private, proprietary segments of the call is necessary.
Currently, the most popular approach is to manually remove the private audio segments of each call. The manual process involves a person listening to each call and removing the segments that are deemed to contain private information. The private segments of the scrutinized media file are commonly replaced with a single tone or silence. The new media recording is then saved with all of the private sections replaced by the silence or tone.
An alternative approach to removing the private information is to encrypt the entire file. This does safeguard privacy when encrypted, but privacy is no longer maintained when the audio files are played.
Yet another approach that is also in use is not to record the call data at all. This approach avoids all of the complications and responsibilities that are associated with recording the data. However, the benefits of training and better analytics systems are never realized.
Therefore, what is needed is a technique to process a media stream that comprises private audio content, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art.